Category: Arts & Culture

Some more details about the
Annunciation painting posted last week, which was painted by Jan van Eyck
around 1434-36.

ECCE ANCILLA D[OMI]NI This is backwards and upside-down because Mary is speaking to God the Father (seen in the upper window)
	SCENES OF HEROISM The floor has illustrations of one man doing great things (in this case, Sampson destroying the enemies of God)
	COMPLEX COMPOSITION The composition uses two perspectives: the foreground objects have a vanishing point somewhere in Mary’s abdomen, thus focusing attention on where Jesus is conceived. The other lines have their vanishing point just past the righthand side of the painting.
		THE TRINITY God the Father appears in the stained-glass window at the top, God the Son is in Mary’s womb, and God the Holy Spirit is the dove descending on the golden sunbeams.
	INTRICATE DETAILS At left, see how the crystal of Gabriel’s scepter is translucent, allowing part of his hand and the pillar in the back to be visible. Also, note the light refracted through the circular glass in the topmost picture.
THE MOST ASTONISHING DETAIL The painting is only a little over a foot wide and slightly less than three feet tall. It was the left panel of a triptych, a three-part painting that usually had one central painting in the middle, with two painted panels on the sides that closed to conceal all of the paintings. Typically, a sacred triptych would have been closed except during Mass, at which time it would have been opened while the priest was at the altar. The congregation would have been too far away to see any fine details (though they would have been able to see that it was the Annunciation), and the priest would have been busy praying. This meticulous work — hours of sketching, layering expensive pigmented oil paints, getting the simulated lighting and skin tones just right — would have scarcely been seen by anyone except God Almighty. More information about the painting is at the National Gallery of Art.

Yassir Arafat gives the thumbs-up to “The Passion of the Christ.”

Marvin Olasky’s Christian newsmagazine WORLD has a cover story on art and culture, and makes an interesting point about art as a divine vocation:

“Bezalel and Oholiab and every craftsman in whom the Lord has put skill and intelligence to know how to do any work in the construction of the sanctuary shall work in accordance with all that the Lord has commanded.” And Moses called Bezalel and Oholiab and every craftsman in whose mind the Lord had put skill, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work (Exodus 35:30-36:2).
This is the first text of Scripture that directly teaches the doctrine of vocation: Bezalel has been “called by name.” Bezalel, also the first to be described as having been filled with the Holy Spirit, is given a task by God, who has called him not into some prophetic office, but to work with his hands, to serve God and his neighbors by being an artist.

I wrote this essay about Martha Stewart four years ago in a writing class. I had intended to shop it around for publication somewhere, but my daughter was born a month later and I never got around to it. Not knowing much about Ms. Stewart and her empire, but seeing that she made a lot of people angry, I wanted to know more about her. An excerpt:
Feminists probably think of Martha Stewart the way capitalists think of pawnshops – the seedy side of their ideology, unsightly yet unavoidable. She may be a success on her own terms, but that success is compromised by her subject matter. It’s all right to be a rich corporate lawyer, but to become wealthy by telling people how to give parties, well, that’s so very…domestic.

As Joe Sobran and various others have pointed out, one complaint about the Passion movie is to call it “pornographic” because of its violence.
But apparently you can leave out the qualifier! The admirable Jesuit professor Fr. Ronald Tacelli gave a talk at my parish on Sunday, and mentioned the latest theory he’s heard from the cultured despisers of religion. Some people are saying that Passion is just plain porn: or gay porn, to be specific. Now that’s pretty ridiculous, Professor Tacelli says: if Mel Gibson were to turn the Crucifixion of our Lord into gay erotica, the liberals would be praising it! They’d say it’s “transgressive”!